icegov2012 proceedings

Information Sharing in Inter-departmental Collaboration: A
Conceptual Framework for Local Government Authorities
Alinaghi Ziaee Bigdeli
Brunel University
Kingston Lane, UB8 3PH
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
cspgaaz@brunel.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This research attempts to develop a socio-technical framework for
Inter-departmental Electronic Information Sharing (EIS) in Local
Government Authorities (LGAs).
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.0 INFORMATION SYSTEMS GENERAL
General Terms
Management, Security, Human Factors, Standardization
1. INTRODUCTION
Decision-making over adopting Inter-Organisational Information
Systems (IOIS) that facilitate information sharing in an electronic
manner has become in the centre of attention of researchers and
practitioners in the field of information systems. It can be argued
that a conceptual framework that examines EIS in LGAs is very
limited. Several drawbacks can be identified regarding the
existing frameworks as they: (1) mainly focus on either
organisational or technological side of EIS, and do not look at the
effort from a socio-technical perspective, (2) concern mainly
about sharing information in Federal/Central governments, (3) do
not map the influential factors on different stages of decisionmaking
phases and (4) do not prioritise the influential factors
based on their importance on different stages of decision-making
process.
2. EIS CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Factors Influencing EIS in LGAs
In this section, it is attempted to provide a rich and broad picture
of five main areas influencing any IOS initiative (i.e. EIS) based
on the procedural framework of Inter-organisational Systems’
adoption proposed by Kurnia and Johnston [1]; (a) External
Environment, (b) Capability of Organisation, (c) Technology
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Muhammad Kamal
Brunel University
Kingston Lane, UB8 3PH
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
Muhammad.Kamal@
brunel.ac.uk
485
Sergio de Cesare
Brunel University
Kingston Lane, UB8 3PH
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
Sergio.deCesare@brunel.ac.uk
Environment, (d) EIS Characteristics, and (e) Inter-departmental
Environment. First factor group, External Environment, proposes
that certain conditions outside the focal organisation may affect
the decision to adopt any inter-organisational collaboration.
Regarding EIS in LGAs, these factors include any pressure from
outside the specific local authority (e.g. from the Central
Government) that influence the department’s decision on sharing
information electronically. Second factor group, Capability of
Organisation, observes the capability of the focal organisation in
adopting those innovations that require collaboration among its
sections and departments. Third group of factor, Nature of
Technology, considers all technological factors which require the
establishment of any IOIS. It can be argued that LGAs suffer from
what may be termed as “IT lag time” that means there is a large
gap between the adoption of new technologies and its acceptance
and reutilisation across the entire organisation. Forth group of
factor, EIS characteristic, refers to all attributes of electronic
information sharing such as benefits and costs that influence the
decision over sharing information. In addition to these four areas,
the decision over EIS incorporates extra influences arising from
complex and dynamic interaction among different departments
and their suppliers, known as Inter-departmental Environment.
Nevertheless, these factors have yet to be evaluated through real
and practical cases and therefore the researchers propose the
following research proposition for further investigation:
Research Proposition A – Proposed Factors Influencing EIS:
The proposed factors may influence the decision-making on EIS in
inter-departmental collaboration in LGAs.
2.2 Investigating the Phases of Participation
Rogers [2] indicates that an adoption process is the process in
which an individual or agency first, experiences the knowledge of
innovation, second, alters the attitudes towards that innovation,
third, makes decision to adopt or reject, and last, implements and
confirms the decision. Regarding inter-departmental information
sharing in LGAs, it would be vital to clarify the stages in which
each department goes through prior to information sharing effort.
These stages that lead to institutionalisation of EIS within LGAs
might be conceptualised as temporal consequences in which the
agencies pass through from the initiation phase to sustainability.
After analysing innovation adoption literature on private and
public sector, the researchers propose five phases of decisionmaking
for EIS; (a) Incentive that refers to the state when a
department within an LGA is asked or wishes to share information
electronically with another department, (b) Conception that
signifies a plan of action that the agency should pursue. In the